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Financing the Edwardian Cinema Boom, 1909–1914

2010; Routledge; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439681003619349

1465-3451

Jon Burrows, Matthew A. Brown,

Art History and Market Analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 For the most detailed discussion of some of the common charges laid at Edwardian cinemas’ doors by these various groups, see Jon Burrows, Penny pleasures II: indecency, anarchy and junk film in London's ‘nickelodeons,’ 1906–1914, Film History, 16(2) (Summer 2004), 182–193. 2 Academic scholarship first addressed this topic in Robert L. Sklar's Movie-Made America: a cultural history of American movies (New York, Random House, 1975), 18–32. It has received its most penetrating examination in Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: movies and censorship in early-twentieth-century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, University of California Press, 2004), passim. 3 Kinema Registrations and Liquidations, Financial Times, 11 June 1914, 6. 4 Electric Theatre Flotations, Reynolds's Newspaper, 12 December 1909, 10. 5 Cinematograph Theatre Position, Financial News, 30 September 1910, 5. 6 Whispers, The Rialto, 30 November 1910, 2. 7 The rise and fall of electric theatres, Financial Review of Reviews, VII(63) (January 1911), 70. 8 Kinema Finance, The Financier, 22 May 1914, 6. 9 Arnold Bennett, The Price of Love (London, Methuen, 1914), 203. 10 Nick Hiley, ‘Nothing more than a craze’: cinema building in Britain from 1909 to 1914, in: Andrew Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent? Cinema and Britain, 1896–1930 (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2002), 121, 122. 11 Ibid., 124. 12 The most explicit attempts to categorise the place of film exhibition within this matrix include Ben Singer's comments on the ethnicity, scale of organisation and short-lived careers of nickelodeon entrepreneurs in New York, in: Manhattan nickelodeons: new data on audiences and exhibitors, Cinema Journal, 34(3) (Spring 1995), 26–28, and Constance Balides’ discussion of a contemporary economist's celebration of the nickelodeon business as a metonym for the emergence of a modern consumer-oriented economy, in: Cinema under the sign of money: commercialized leisure, economies of abundance, and pecuniary madness, 1905–1915, in: Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (eds), American Cinema's Transitional Era: audiences, institutions, practices (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, University of California Press, 2004), 285–314. 13 Kinema Registrations and Liquidations, Financial Times, 11 June 1914, 6. 14 Commercial History and Review of 1910, The Economist, 18 February 1911, 9. 15 Picture Theatre Finance, Rinking World and Picture Theatre News, 5 February 1910, 22. 16 Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 22 February 1911, 4. 17 Ibid., 8 February 1912, 819; 6 March 1913, 1832. 18 Kinema Finance, The Times, 11 March 1914, 19. 19 See David J. Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography: a biographical dictionary of business leaders active in Britain in the period 1860–1980, vols 1 and 3 (London, Butterworths, 1984). 20 Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 17 November 1910, 79; Rinking World and Picture Theatre News, 15 November 1910, 2. 21 Picture Theatre Finance, ibid., 2 July 1910, 14. 22 An Open Letter to Mr. Montagu A. Pyke, of Dewar House, Haymarket, The Bioscope, 10 March 1910, 9. 23 Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 21 December 1911, 279, 377. 24 Kinematograph Finance, ibid., 25 June 1914, 38; 22 October 1914, 50–51. 25 Ibid., 9 May 1912, 187; Suit Against the Director of a Picture Theatre, The Times, 9 July 1914, 3. 26 See, for example, Kinematograph Finance, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 16 January 1913, 1168–1169; 30 January 1913, 1364; 15 May 1913, 319. 27 Ibid., 10 October 1912, 1735. For an example of Montgomery's initial admiration for Pyke, see Picture Theatre Finance, Rinking World and Picture Theatre News, 2 July 1910, 14. 28 Kinematograph Finance, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 25 January 1912, 701 29 See, for example, ibid., 2 May 1912, 121; 25 April 1912, 49. 30 These figures are drawn from the following Board of Trade company registration files held at the National Archives: BT 31/19104/106111, BT 31/13185/108815, BT 31/19363/108656, BT 31/13091/107645, and from: List of Picture Theatre Companies, Picture Theatre News, 23 August 1911, 20; Kinematograph Finance, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 8 August 1912, 993. 31 E.g., Kinematograph Finance, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 8 May 1913, 219. 32 Ibid., 16 May 1912, 251. 33 The Capital Market, The Economist, 22 February 1913, 409. 34 Ibid., 405. 35 Employment, Strikes and Wages, The Economist, 21 February 1914, 420. 36 The direct impact of the Cinematograph Act in stimulating an increase of new cinemas in London and bringing stability to the trade is demonstrated in Jon Burrows, Penny pleasures: film exhibition in London during the nickelodeon era, 1906–1914, Film History, 16(1) (2004), 82–86. 37 H.B. Montgomery, How to Form, Conduct and Manage a Picture Theatre Company (London, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, Ltd., 1913), 4. 38 B.R. Mitchell (ed.), British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 681. 39 Frank W. Ogden Smith, Picture Theatre Finance, The Bioscope, 27 March 1913, 941. 40 This statement accompanied the publication of company formation and dissolution statistics covering 1908 to 1915 in the report of the National Council of Public Morals’ Cinema Commission of Inquiry: The Cinema. Its present position and future possibilities (London, Williams and Norgate, 1917), 2–3. The Financial Times also periodically reported sector-specific figures released by the Board of Trade, occasionally offering a more detailed breakdown; see, for example, Kinema Registrations and Liquidations, Financial Times, 11 June 1914, 6. 41 Figures taken from Statistical Abstract for the UK (62nd Report), Cmd 8128 (London, HMSO, 1915), Table 79, 337. 42 The quotation is from Hiley, ‘Nothing More Than a Craze’, 120. 43 National figures taken from Statistical Abstract for the UK (62nd Report), Cmd 8128, Table 157 (and note). 44 This data is derived from a study of all Receiving Orders issued in the UK between 1910 and 1914, as published in the London Gazette, which is the official newspaper of record in the UK for personal bankruptcy orders. It is worth noting that the Inspector General's Annual Reports give the following national totals for Receiving and Administration Orders: 1910, 3880; 1911, 3742; 1912, 3581; 1913, 3358; 1914, 2867. The consistent decline in bankruptcy orders in this period is another indicator of the favourable economic climate in which the film exhibition industry was established. 45 John F. Wilson, British Business History 1720–1994 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995), 120. 46 The Cinema, 22 October 1914, iii. The exhibitor in question was J.A. Hobson, owner of the Bramley Picture Palace, near Leeds. Although he came to the trade with no background in the entertainment business, he was soon installed as a member of the Executive Committee of the Yorkshire branch of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association. 47 Dilwyn Porter, ‘A trusted guide of the investing public’: Harry Marks and the Financial News 1884–1916, Business History, 28(1) (1986), 11, 3. 48 Kinematograph Finance, Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 11 April 1912, 1325. 49 Porter, ‘A trusted guide of the investing public’, 12. 50 John Armstrong, The rise and fall of the company promoter, and the financing of British industry, in: Jean Jacques Van Helten and Youssef Cassis (eds), Capitalism in a Mature Economy: financial institutions, capital exports and British industry 1870–1939 (Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1990), 130. 51 Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, 1906–1914 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 19.